AMID POLITICAL GRIDLOCK, BUILDING BRIDGES

The bicycling commuter in pipestem jeans is not just a caricature of nerdy Pacific Northwest cool. Miles driven per year in old-fashioned automobiles – partly through dint of pedal power and pedestrians – are lower now than in 1995 on Multnomah County's major thoroughfares, according to state figures, even as the population has grown by more than 21 percent.

But follow the bike lanes and greenways north to the Columbia River, where the spidery steel trusses of the Interstate 5 bridge clutch the banks, and Portland looks like any typical American city, choked by traffic. The oldest elements of the bridge date from 1917.

These intertwined, competing identities are central to what comes next for the Columbia River Crossing, a $3.4 billion bridge-replacement project of highway ramps, traffic lanes and light rail linking Portland to Vancouver, Wash., that was supposed to resolve a traffic choke point. The old plan, after more than 20 years and tens of millions of dollars' worth of studies, was killed last month by the Washington state Senate after the Republican-dominated majority coalition declined to vote on financing it.

The governors of Oregon and Washington, both Democrats, immediately ordered further planning work halted.

Then, almost without missing a beat, local leaders picked up the ball. If political paralysis in Olympia – Washington's capital – had killed the old proposal, they said, cooperation on the ground, by people who have witnessed the region's transportation changes firsthand, would find the way.

“Let's leave all that behind and talk city to city about what we envision our future to be,” said Josh Alpert, policy director in the office of Portland Mayor Charlie Hales. Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt agreed. Thinking locally, he said, and acting locally, too, in a conversation with Portland is the way forward. “People are regrouping, taking a deep breath,” Leavitt said.

Move aside, legislatures

There is a pattern in this, reflected across the nation, say planners, economists and academics: Cities are taking the lead. As recession and government downsizing have squeezed federal and state options, and partisan stalemate politics have crippled some state capitals, local leaders have pushed the front lines of change, if only by necessity.

“The cavalry is not coming,” Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley wrote in their recently published book, “The Metropolitan Revolution,” which lays out case studies of urban self-assertion and innovation. “With each illustration of partisan gridlock and each indication of federal, and also state, unreliability, metros are becoming more ambitious in their design, more assertive in their advocacy, more expansive in their reach.”

On the Columbia River, Portland and Vancouver officials said they had no illusions that they could build, on their own, a major interstate highway bridge on a major freight and passenger corridor that runs from Canada to California and carries an average of 124,000 vehicles a day. Even the much smaller Skagit River Bridge, which collapsed in May on I-5 about four hours to the north, will cost more than $15 million to replace.

But the officials say they at least can start breaking eggs to make the omelet. The old plan had a sense of inevitability, they said, that nothing could be changed for fear of unwinding the many delicate political compromises built in over the years. A new plan would put everything back on the table.

Softened demand

Even a mass-transit element, which Portland had insisted on before, could be rethought, Alpert said, if, for example, an existing freight rail bridge over the water could be used for passenger transit in a new plan. Leavitt, a civil engineer who said he leans to the right politically – though the Vancouver mayor's office is nonpartisan – said he bristled at what he says was hostility toward liberal Portland by conservatives in the Washington Legislature. In a completely interconnected economy, he said, a blow against Portland is a blow against Vancouver.

The truth, transportation data suggests, is that the entire Pacific Northwest is developing a unique transportation profile.

Since 1990, for example, per capita gasoline use has fallen in many states. But Washington and Oregon were at the front of the pack, with greater percentage declines than any state except Nevada, the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based research and environmental advocacy group, reported in an analysis of federal and state data. And Nevada's decline was driven mostly by the rapid growth of Las Vegas – more people concentrated in a city without the need to drive vast distances.

“The U.S., in my opinion, is almost like a conglomeration of small, different countries,” said Anna Nagurney, a professor of operations management at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Portland is one of the leaders in terms of all these transportation innovations.”

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